Today, with my lil’ red in tow, I visited the new Yankee Stadium for the first time and I was floored at how beautiful it looks and the way it resonates majestically.

It truly is a shrine for everything that resembles the New York Yankees.

The Great Hall is fit for a king and his court. Banners everywhere celebrating Yankees past and present. The Yankees Store is huge, the food court is amazing. The Hard Rock Cafe is part music, part baseball.

The field is beautiful. The lights around the field are bright and welcoming.

Even for me, as a deaf person, I was pleased to see the real-time captioning happen in between innings. I do wish I could have captions of the play by play announcer and other voices in the Stadium.

I do have some qualms…not everything’s perfect. I’ve read from other bloggers about the shortcomings.

I hate Monument Cave. It is ugly.

I hate the prison-gray walls in the bleachers. Paint them navy blue for goddsakes!

Wow. What a letter from Daily News writer Bill Madden to Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. Although big George has transferred day-to-day operations of the Yankees to son Hal, George is still viewed as the owner. This letter, which I recommend you read in full, really summarizes a lot of the complaints about the $1.5 Billion new Yankee Stadium.

I have included one strong excerpt below and make sure you get a chance to check out the full length letter. But I wanted to point out although I too am upset about the overpriced lower-bowl seats, for the most part I am very much happy with the rest of the stadium. There are policies that need to be changed and I think the Yankees will address them in the offseason. Policies such as not allowing fans to walk to into sections where they don’t have tickets to, or the general huge price of tickets in the lower bowl. I just think that they want to wait on addressing the policies until after the season is completed.

That being said the Yankees do need to address the fact that the common fan, who makes up probably 98% of the overall team fan base, feels unimportant to the Yankees – and that is a HUGE problem. Kids who are growing up Yankee fans need the opportunity to feel the way we did growing up – as a part of the Yankee feeling. Otherwise, all the Yankees will do is push fans to the crosstown Mets, who are much more amicable towards the average fan these days.

So consider this a letter on behalf of the modest income common fan, Boss, the ones you always championed in the past – the bus drivers, bartenders, construction workers, cops, firemen, secretaries and even journalists – who made up the core of your Yankee constituency and to whom [COO Lonn] Trost is now essentially saying:

“You can still come into our ballpark because we have to provide a certain amount of modestly priced tickets, but you must know your place, which is the upper deck. We don’t want you in our high-priced restaurants and we don’t want you getting anywhere near our players or our rich friends.”

Speaking with Peter Gammons at Southern Conneticut State University on Wednesday, Yankees GM Brian Cashman said the team plans to monitor the high consistency of home runs hit at the new Yankee Stadium.

In the first six games the Yankees and their opponents, the Cleveland Indians and Oakland Athletics hit a record 26 dingers. The previous record of 25 was set in 1955 when Kansas City opened Municipal Stadium.

“It’s something we’re going to have to keep our eye on because clearly the numbers don’t lie,” Cashman said.

Cashman also said he thinks it might be part of a wider phenomenon, telling Gammons that home runs are traveling 8 feet farther on average this year then last year. “It’s possible that the ballpark is a home run-type park,” Cashman said. “We’ll see. The ball is going farther in every park, not just ours.”

Cashman was at the university to deliver a scheduled message and spoke with Gammons in an interview before his talk.

The abundance of homers is raising concerns that the new stadium’s design may favor fly balls, which should be alarming to the baseball team that invested $243.5 million on pitching last winter, according to the Daily News.

The wind on Saturday during the Yankees’ 22-4 loss against the Cleveland Indians was mostly from the west at 15-20 mph. Given the layout of the stadium, the wind could have had an effect on fly balls in right field. Six home runs were hit by the Indians in the second inning alone.

Although the field dimensions of the new stadium are exactly that of the old stadium, the shell of the new stadium is shaped differently. AccuWeather.com meteorologists also estimate that the angle of the seating in the new stadium could have an effect on wind speed across the field.

The old Yankee stadium had more stacked tiers and a large upper deck, acting like a solid wall in effect, which would cause the wind to swirl more and be less concentrated. The new Yankee stadium’s tiers are less stacked, making a less sharp slope from the top of the stadium to the field. This shape could enable winds to blow across the field with less restriction. In addition, the slope of the seating would also lead to a “downslope” effect in the field which, depending on wind direction, would tend to cause air to lift up in the right field. Fly balls going into right field during a gusty west wind would be given more of a lift thus carrying the ball farther out into right field.

If the stadium seating tier shape is indeed the issue, games will only be affected during times with the winds are from a westerly direction and above 10 mph. This typically occurs during the spring and the middle to late fall. The calmer weather during the summer should lead to a smaller number of home runs. In the meantime, the home run derby may continue.

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This is interesting news and sort of folows the idea of what I was thinking might be the cause due to the open windows in the shell. I did not consider the different sloping of the seats and how that would create a downward draft with a lifting effect into the right field stands.

MLB.com will start its live programming of the unveiling of the Yankee Stadium at 10:15am.

For those of you who can…make sure you can watch the game online or in person, or on television. I’m just pissed off I cannot because I’m a high school teacher in Baltimore Oriole country and my school’s internet firewall prevents live video streaming. I’ll have to check the score updates online instead.